Read part four of our top ten unmissable poems published in Poetry Wales from the last 5 years. To celebrate 55 years of publishing poetry, every Friday we’ll be releasing two poems from the list, with our final post including a downloadable PDF edition of the poems. The ten poems in this short collection were selected by Nia Davies, editor of Poetry Wales (2014-19). Our top 5 poems are included for free with our Summer 2019 issue.

no. 4

Moat

by Sarah Kelly

place around everything a

line. Lines social or scented, historic

& laden, we’ll chew your specks to

a castle shaped mess

The sand can scribe and

guard, all our exits stand

waiting and steady

This is real land, real stakes,

real hearts

the risk of it.

And as daughters you

repeat, they become

your repeat, resplendent.

This is real land, real stakes,

real sink, the risk,

the moat, all heart.

 

‘Moat’ first appeared in Poetry Wales Volume 54 Number 3. Sarah Elisa Kelly is a poet and artist currently completing a TECHNE funded PhD at the Royal College of Art. Her poetry publications include the chapbooks locklines and Ways of Describing Cuts both with KFS press and anthologies Better than Language (Ganzfeld) and Dear World and Everyone In It (Bloodaxe). She was 2015 poet in resident at the university of Loughborough and a recipient of a Stationers Fund award and Francis Mathew Scholarship alongside several residency and development grants. She lives and works in London.

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no. 3

The Wish

by Megan Watkins

She was the funny one, she cried a lot too. Half-Australian.

We sat at the edge of the fields, ten years old. Always busy with our hands,

with grass or hair or sand, looking out across the town

like runaways (there was no town).

 

She was scared of her step-brother when her step-Dad was out.

He called me Shadow, like a dog. She wrote

that she remembers my mum in a dress, narrow stairs. A lovely house,

printing presses, a yard (there is no house).

 

They took her with them and I never saw her again.

We are meeting for a drink before Christmas,

it will be as if nothing happened, not Fremantle, not Oswestry.

None of that has to be currency (there is only a coin).

 

I won’t be like this in the pub. She will make me laugh, we might dance.

I remember making marbled paper together, the thick water, a comb.

You felt that you could make any pattern

but somehow the pattern just made and re-made itself (there is only a well).

 

‘The Wish’ by Megan Watkins was first published in Poetry Wales Volume 51 Number 3 in 2016. Megan Watkins grew up in Powys and has lived in London for 15 years. Her work appears in Transom, Magma, the Morning Star, the Echo Room, Tears in the Fence, Brittle Star, Smiths Knoll and the Emma Press Anthology of Motherhood.

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The ten poems were selected by Nia Davies, editor of Poetry Wales (2014-19). Nia Davies is a poet and PhD candidate at Salford University where she is undertaking practice-based research into poetry and ritual. She has co-curated and participated in several transcultural collaborations, projects and events and her work has been widely translated. Her most recent publications are All fours (Bloodaxe Books, 2017), England (Crater, 2017) and Interversions (Poetrywala, 2018), which documents her collaboration with Kannada poet Mamta Sagar.

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